20 November 21
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I like New York because my wife loves it for the museums, theater, friends, and Central Park. If it were up to me, I’d go back to the log cabin in the woods where I lived when I met her, but here I am and it’s okay. But whenever I hear that awful song (“Start spreading the news”) I have to leave the room. New York life is not about being “king of the hill, top of the heap,” it’s about appreciating civil order.
A great civility prevails here. A woman stopped me the other day to point out that my shoelace was untied. I saw an old lady topple over and within three seconds, ten people were there at her side to assist and comfort. I ask directions and people are helpful. I’m a slow walker and younger people don’t thrust themselves past me, they yield. It’s a tolerant culture. You could go out walking in your pajamas and people would accept this as idiosyncrasy or they’d figure you were under indictment and going for the insanity defense. You could burst into tears in a café and people might offer the name of their therapist or tell you about something that happened to them recently. Homosexuality was never considered a sickness because that’d mean too many people not showing up for work.
You appreciate civility all the more when it’s threatened and these days New York is beset with a plague of e-vehicles, bicycles and scooters, the skinny kind you stand up on, that run silently like a torpedo at 30 mph, ignoring red lights, weaving through traffic and along bike lanes and sometimes onto sidewalks. The scooterist probably imagines he is a progressive but actually he is a terrorist. The only time the idea of gun ownership has crossed my mind was when an electric scooter swerved around me, running a red light, and I imagined pulling out my .357 Magnum.
The .357 Magnum was the gun Dick Tracy carried. As a child, I came home from church Sunday morning and read about Dick Tracy’s campaign against evildoers and so I grew up to be a decent person. At school I stood in line in the cafeteria, apologized if I bumped someone, and spoke when spoken to. Myrtle the cook dished up the Spanish rice and wieners and I said, “Thank you.” I sat at a table with the nice kids. Thus was I introduced to civil society. I avoided the school bully. (I met him at a class reunion recently and he told me about his extensive gun collection. No surprise there.)
When the scooterist zooms past me and barely avoids the stroller with two infants, I have to reconsider individualism as a way of life. I used to admire Thoreau who said, “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” But there were no electric scooters in Concord back then. And when I think, “Advance confidently without regard to red lights, and live the life you wish, ignoring what may be in your path, and you will succeed in scaring the bejesus out of people,” it doesn’t sound like Henry anymore.
When I made fun of “lawn order,” I was having fun feeling frisky but now, seeing the resistance to mask mandates and other public health measures, the political attacks on public education, something more ominous is going on. One hopes for the best: what else can you do? But I’m lucky to be in New York. I board the C train and the car is crowded and more and more people board until we’re packed in tight, standing inches away from each other, avoiding eye contact, contained in a tiny space, and to me it’s the ultimate in civility. A dense crowd of considerate people. Spread the news.
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Mary Altaffer/AP)
Senator Bernie Sanders, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, is already envisioning some changes. In a statement, Sanders said he hopes to see the bill "strengthened in a number of ways" in the Senate.
Specifically, he's calling for the wealthiest Americans and large corporations to "pay their fair share of taxes." The slimmed-down framework omitted an increase of the corporate tax rate and the top tax rate for the highest-earning taxpayers. A billionaire's tax was also briefly in contention, but shot down within a day.
Sanders also called for lower prescription drug prices, and a Medicare expansion that would cover vision, dental, and hearing aids.
"Is that really too much to ask in the richest country on Earth — that elderly people have teeth in their mouth and can see and can hear?" Sanders said previously.
Sanders also said that the Senate must act "to combat the existential threat of climate change and transform our energy system away from fossil fuels."
For now, progressives are celebrating a win as their centerpiece legislation moves forward
Following its passage, progressives lauded the policies in the legislation, like universal pre-K and national paid and family leave. Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar celebrated the passage by dancing with a Build Back Better character on the steps of the Capitol building.
Missouri Rep. Cori Bush wrote on Twitter that her vote for the bill "was for the home care workers in my district who urged me with teary eyes not to leave behind the part of the Build Back Better Agenda that took care of them too."
She added: "Senator Manchin: We're looking at you. The people must win."
Sanders and other progressives are likely to run up against opposition from key centrists Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who have been responsible for the package getting pared down from its original $3.5 trillion price tag. Sinema opposes higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations; Manchin has pushed back on provisions like paid leave, and the overall size of the package.
Manchin has frequently expressed concerns with the cost of the bill and how it will impact the US budget, but given the Congressional Budget Office's statement on Thursday that Democrats' proposed framework would add just $160 billion to the budget deficit over ten years, Manchin's inflation concerns might be eased.
The bill now heads to the Senate, and Biden wrote in a statement on Friday that he hopes to sign a critical piece of his economic agenda into law "as soon as possible." Earlier this week, he signed his bipartisan infrastructure bill into law.
Idaho's lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, speaks at a rally on the statehouse steps in Boise. (photo: Darin Oswald/AP)
In Oklahoma, Idaho, Wyoming and California, the next generation of GOP extremists are passing laws, picking their own voters … and preparing for power
The state party chairman, John Bennett, a veteran of three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, has described Islam as a “cancer in our nation that needs to be cut out” and posted a yellow Star of David on Facebook to liken coronavirus vaccine mandates to the persecution of Jewish people in Nazi Germany.
This is just one illustration of how Republican parties at the state level are going to new extremes in their embrace of Trump, an ominous sign ahead of midterm elections next year and a potential glimpse of the national party’s future. Yet the radicalisation often takes place under the radar of the national media.
“We are not a swing state and we’re nowhere near a swing state so no one’s looking,” said Alicia Andrews, chair of the Oklahoma Democratic party. “And because no one is looking at Oklahoma, we are allowed to be way more extreme than a lot of states.”
Andrews pointed to the example of a state law passed by the Republican majority in April that grants immunity to drivers who unintentionally injure or kill protesters and stiffens penalties for demonstrators who block public roadways.
“Only three states passed it, with Oklahoma being the first,” she said. “And you know why? Because there wasn’t national attention. We were talking about Florida passing it and Texas passing it. No one was even considering what was going on in Oklahoma and it quietly passed in Oklahoma.”
Similarly, Andrew argues, while other states were debating “critical race theory” in schools, in Oklahoma a ban was rammed through with little coverage. Another concern is gerrymandering, the process whereby a party redraws district boundaries for electoral advantage.
Andrews, the first African American to lead the Oklahoma Democratic party, said: “Our legislators are in a special session right now to review our maps and they are really eroding an urban core, taking at least 6,000 Hispanic Americans out of an urban district and moving them to a rural district, thus denuding their votes. I didn’t think that they could make it worse but they are.”
Oklahoma is a deep red state. As of August, its house and senate had 121 Republicans and 28 Democrats. It continues to hold “Stop the Steal” rallies pushing Trump’s “big lie” that Joe Biden robbed him of victory in the presidential election.
Andrews warns that Republicans in her state are indicative of a national trend.
“Their stated strategy is start at the municipal level, take over the state, take over the nation. So while everybody’s talking about the infrastructure plan and the Build Back Better plan, they’re rubbing their hands together and making differences in states.”
She added: “We’re like the testing ground for their most radical right exercises, and once they perfect it here, they can take it to other states.”
‘Owning the libs’
Republican state parties’ rightward spiral has included promotion of Trump’s “big lie” about electoral fraud, white nationalism and QAnon, an antisemitic conspiracy theory involving Satan-worshipping cannibals and a child sex-trafficking ring. It can find bizarre and disturbing expression.
Arizona staged a sham “audit” of the 2020 presidential election that only confirmed Biden’s victory in the state. Last month in Idaho, when Governor Brad Little was out of the state, his lieutenant, Janice McGeachin, issued an executive order to prevent employers requiring employees be vaccinated against Covid-19. Little rescinded it on his return.
The Wyoming state party central committee this week voted to no longer recognise the congresswoman Liz Cheney – daughter of the former vice-president Dick Cheney and a hardline conservative – as a Republican, its second formal rebuke for her criticism of Trump and vote to impeach him for his role in the US Capitol attack.
Nina Hebert, communications director of the state Democratic party, said: “Wyoming is not exempt from the extremism that Trump has intentionally cultivated and fuelled and continues to court today.
“He was a popular figure in Wyoming in the 2016 election and he retains that popularity amongst voters in the state, which I think is the most red in the nation.”
Gerrymandering is a longstanding problem, Hebert said, but Trump’s gleeful celebration of the 6 January riot has opened floodgates.
“They have created situations where Republican-controlled state legislatures have no reason to pretend even that they’re not just trying to hold on to power. This has become something that is acceptable within the Republican party.”
The shift has also been evident in policy in Florida, Texas and other states where Republicans have taken aim at abortion access, gun safety, trans and voting rights. Often, zealous officials seem to be trying to outdo one another in outraging liberals, known as “owning the libs”.
The drift is not confined to red states. When Republicans in California, a Democratic bastion, sought to recall Governor Gavin Newsom, they rallied around a Trumpian populist in the conservative talk radio host Larry Elder rather than a more mainstream figure such as Kevin Faulconer, a former mayor of San Diego.
Kurt Bardella, an adviser to the Democratic National Committee who was once an aide to a leading California Republican, said: “To me that was a bellwether. If even a state like California can’t get a more moderate, pragmatic Republican party at the state level, there’s really no hope for any of the parties in any state at this point.
“They’re leaning so hard into this anti-democratic, authoritarian, non-policy-based iteration and identity. The old adage, ‘As goes California, so goes the country,’ well, look at what the California Republican party did and we’re seeing that play out across the board.”
‘Wackadoodle Republicans’
Like junior sports teams, state parties are incubators and pipelines for generations of politicians heading to Washington. The primary election system tends to favour the loudest and most extreme voices, who can whip up enthusiasm in the base.
Trump has been promiscuous in his endorsements of Maga-loyal candidates for the November 2022 midterms, among them Herschel Walker, a former football star running for the Senate in Georgia despite a troubled past including allegations that he threatened his ex-wife’s life.
Other examples include Sarah Sanders, a former White House press secretary running for governor in Arkansas, and Karoline Leavitt, a 23-year-old former assistant press secretary targeting a congressional seat in New Hampshire.
This week, Amanda Chase, a state senator in Virginia and self-described “Trump in heels”, announced a bid for Congress against the Democrat Abigail Spanberger. Chase gave a speech in Washington on 6 January, hours before the insurrection, and was censured by her state senate for praising the rioters as “patriots”.
The former congressman Joe Walsh, who was part of the Tea Party, a previous conservative movement against the Republican establishment, and now hosts a podcast, said: “I talked to these folks every day, and for people who think [members of Congress] Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert are nuts, they ain’t seen nothing yet.
“The Republicans at the state and local level are way, way more gone than the Republicans in Washington. We’re talking about grassroots voters and activists on the ground and eventually, to win a Republican primary at whatever level, every candidate has to listen to them.
“So you’re going to get a far larger number of wackadoodle Republicans elected to Congress in 2022 because they will reflect the craziness that’s going on state and locally right now.”
Malcolm X was 39 when he was gunned down in New York City. (photo: Getty Images)
We speak with independent researcher Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, whose work is featured in the Netflix documentary “Who Killed Malcolm X?” and helped ignite widespread public support for two men falsely convicted of assassinating the civil rights activist in 1965. Muhammad was in the court room this week a judge exonerated 83-year-old Muhammad Aziz and the late Khalil Islam due to revelations uncovered by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and the Innocence Project that key evidence was withheld at the trial. Aziz has maintained his innocence, and addressed the court after he finally received an official apology, saying his false conviction was “the result of a process that was corrupt to its core.” Muhammad says being in the courtroom was “surreal.” “To watch the government admit that these brothers were sent to prison for a crime they didn’t commit was stunning.”
CY VANCE: We have obtained dozens and dozens of reports from the FBI and the NYPD’s Bureau of Special Services and Investigations. These records include FBI reports of witnesses who failed to identify Mr. Islam and who implicated other subjects and suspects. Significantly, we now have reports revealing that on orders from Director J. Edgar Hoover himself, the FBI ordered multiple witnesses not to tell police or prosecutors that they were in fact FBI informants. Many of those documents were exculpatory. None of them were disclosed to the defense.
AMY GOODMAN: That was the Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance speaking through his mask. 83-year-old Muhammad Aziz also addressed the court. He was jailed for almost two decades for the killing of Malcolm X before being released on parole in 1985. He has been fighting to clear his name ever since. Listen carefully because he, too, is wearing the mask.
MUHAMMAD AZIZ: The event that brought us to court today should never have occurred. Those events were and are the result of a process that was corrupt to its core, one that is all too familiar to Black people in 2021. While I do not need this court, these prosecutors or a piece of paper to tell me I am innocent, I’m very glad that my family, my friends and the attorneys who have worked and supported me all of these years are finally seeing the truth that we have all known officially recognized. I am an 83-year-old man who was victimized by the criminal justice system. I do not know how many more years of creative activity I have. However I hope the same system that was responsible for this travesty of justice also takes responsibility for the immeasurable harm caused to me during the last 55 or 56 years. Thank you, your honor.
AMY GOODMAN: Muhammad Aziz speaking Thursday in a New York courtroom. He was exonerated for his role in the assassination of Malcolm X. The latest investigation into Malcolm’s murder in 1965 was spurred by the Netflix documentary series Who Killed Malcolm X? which was largely based on research done by Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, an independent scholar and historian who has spent decades investigating the life and death of Malcolm X. In a moment, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad will join us, but first, this is the trailer to Who Killed Malcolm X?
MALCOLM X: We are not brutalized because we are Muslims. We are brutalized because we are Black people in America!
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: The power of this man’s courage to say this stuff, it changed the entire trajectory of my life.
PERSON: He was becoming a figure that transcended the Nation of Islam.
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: It was politics that really started the rift between Malcolm and the Nation.
MALCOLM X: [Inaudible] the white man is the greatest hate teacher that ever walked the Earth.
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: The FBI was deathly afraid of someone like Malcolm X.
MALCOLM X: What kind of democracy is that?
PERSON: People had to start wondering, if something happened to Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm becomes the leader, it’s over for all of us.
PERSON: And just then, the gunfire went off.
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: Malcolm’s death never sat right with me.
PERSON: The investigation was a failure.
PERSON: Asking who’s guilty is a dangerous question to ask.
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: What is the real story?
PERSON: It’s in the history book. Leave it there. Leave it alone.
PERSON: Elijah Muhammad told everybody, “Do not raise a hand against Malcolm X.”
PERSON: He didn’t have to give the order. Someone would take care of it.
PERSON: The FBI should have known.
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: Why doesn’t someone want to get to the bottom of this?
PERSON: They never had any intentions of seriously investigating that assassination.
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: That is my mission. I’m not going to stop until I get justice. Because the official account of who killed Malcolm X, it’s not true.
AMY GOODMAN: Those are the words of Abdur-Rahman Muhammad in the trailer to the 2020 Netflix documentary series Who Killed Malcolm X?. Abdur-Rahman Muhammad joins us now. Welcome back to Democracy Now! You were in the courtroom yesterday. Can you describe the scene? You have two men who served each more than 20 years in prison for the assassination of Malcolm X. One of them died, Khalil Islam, more than a decade ago. But Muhammad Aziz stood there in the courtroom. Talk about the moment, describe the scene.
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: Amy, it was a beautiful fall afternoon. The weather could not have been better in New York. When we sat down, we had to process what we were witnessing. It was surreal. It was almost out of body to be sitting there and watching an exoneration, not a pardon, an exoneration, long after half a century, a half a century, of a man who was still living! A man present, 83 years old. And to watch the government admit that these brothers were sent to prison for a crime they did not commit, it was stunning. It was stunning. It was breathtaking, honestly. It just took my breath away.
AMY GOODMAN: A lot of this is based on your research, a lay historian, who just devoted your life to uncovering what happened. Can you talk about who Mujahid Abdul Hakim is, who spoke to a reporter yesterday briefly, to The New York Times in favor of the exoneration, and his role in the assassination?
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: Mujahid Abdul Hakim, back in those days, the winter of 1965, he was known as Talmadge Hayer. At the time he was arrested, he was known, the name that was put on his jacket was Thomas Hagan. But he is one of the confessed assassins who was caught at the scene. One of Malcolm’s bodyguards shot him in the leg and he was literally stomped almost to death outside the Audubon Ballroom. He was convicted for the crime, along with Muhammad Aziz, who was Norman 3X Butler at that time, and Khalil Islam, Thomas 15X Johnson. He is the one who gave us the names of the real assassins.
And Amy, I would say this, that it was our revelation, the revelation that I published in 2010, of the identity of Al-Mustafa Shabazz, William X Bradley that revived this entire investigation. Before that and before his name appearing in Manning Marable’s book, crediting that revelation to me, the little independent scholar here in Washington, D.C., it completely blew the lid off this whole case, revived it from the dead, literally from the dead. And that material finds its way into Who Killed Malcolm X? and we have what we have today. I am appreciative to the lawyers, David Shanies and Barry Scheck, for acknowledging that in the courtroom. Talmadge Hayer filed his affidavit in 1977 and 1978 where he named his four accomplices. It was an affidavit that was ignored by the criminal justice system. There it was laid out in black and white, their names, how they carried out the assassination, how they planned it. Law enforcement never, ever, ever made any attempt to arrest those men.
AMY GOODMAN: I only wish Manning Marable and Les Payne, two great writers could be with us today as well. Both died on the eve of the publications of their books on Malcolm X. I want to go to the clip from that Netflix docuseries Who Killed Malcolm X? where you, our guest, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, describes footage of the scene outside the Audubon Ballroom after the assassination.
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: The coroner ruled the cause of death to be the shotgun pellet. It wasn’t the wounds from the shooters after the shot that killed Malcolm X. The cause of death was ruled to be the sawed-off shotgun.
PERSON: Rally attendees seized one of the gunmen as he tried to escape the Audubon.
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: There is archival film of the scene outside the Audubon Ballroom right after the assassination.
PERSON: These men are engaged in a brutal tug-of-war [inaudible].
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: You see the scuffle between the police and the crowd that was trying to beat down Talmadge Hayer, the only one of the assassins to confess. There is a man standing on the edge of that crowd who looks a lot like William Bradley, who according to Hayer fired the shotgun that killed Malcolm. He is feigning like he is part of the brawl. And in that kind of misdirection, he steps back and then you see him walk across the frame, very calmly, closing his coat, and he just walks away. This is how he got away. If William Bradley is the man who pulled off that shotgun and took the life of Malcolm X and I can prove it, I want to confront him face-to-face.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about whether you ever did confront him. But talk about who William Bradley is and how this was suppressed for decades.
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: That’s right. William, he is called in Talmadge Hayer’s affidavit “William X,” William X Bradley. He was a lieutenant in Muhammad’s Mosque #25 in Newark, the temple where the assassins hailed from. He was a street thug. He was a bank robber. He was very proficient with a sawed-off shotgun, which is the reason why he was selected to carry out the assassination of Malcolm X because they knew he would accomplish the task. Long criminal record, especially after Malcolm’s assassination. He lived a life unmolested in Newark. He was never approached by law enforcement about the assassination of Malcolm X. He did spend many years in prison for other crimes, but not the killing of Brother Malcolm.
AMY GOODMAN: Did you get a chance to talk to him?
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: I did not get a chance to talk to him. I mean, there’s no way in the world I would have approached that man’s house by myself. The truth of the matter is that what I did is really the work of law enforcement. I can’t walk up to a dangerous felon’s house and say, “Why did you kill Malcolm X? Why did you murder Malcolm X?” You need a team, you need security. By the time we was able to put together the team for Who Killed Malcolm X? where I had proper security and would be able to make that move, unfortunately, he passed away in the middle of production as we were on the cusp of visiting his home there in Newark, New Jersey.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the issue of all the FBI informants involved here. Let’s go to another clip from the documentary series, Who Killed Malcolm X?
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: In the 1960s, the FBI launched one of the biggest counterintelligence operations in its entire history.
MALCOLM X: Black people everywhere today are fed up with the hypocrisy practiced by whites.
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: They kept a very close watch on Brother Malcolm.
MALCOLM X: If something isn’t done, then I’m afraid that you will have a racial explosion, and a racial explosion is more deadly than an atomic explosion.
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, was deathly afraid of someone like Malcolm X. Malcolm was being surveilled. He was being followed. His phone was tapped.
PERSON: If you look at the investigation of Malcolm X, it’s when he becomes a public figure for the Nation of Islam that the Bureau starts taking more of an interest into his subversive rhetoric.
PERSON: You seem to be dissatisfied with everything. Just what do you want?
MALCOLM X: I’m not dissatisfied with everything. I’m just telling you that the Negros themselves should take whatever steps necessary to defend themselves.
PERSON: The FBI had multiple high-ranking paid human informants in the leadership of the Nation of Islam. Could it have been that FBI informants were actively involved in Malcolm’s murder? Almost certainly so.
PERSON: Some members of the Nation of Islam became willing tools, but they were the puppets. The puppeteers were in charge of that whole situation.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s just another clip from the Netflix series Who Killed Malcolm X? that everyone should see, that really features Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, our guest, who is the lay historian who laid out this research, has spent his life, all his off-time working at various jobs really investigating this. It is truly amazing, Abdul-Rahman. Talk about the FBI informants and others who were not identified at the time, suppressed by J. Edgar Hoover. This was raised by Cy Vance in the courtroom.
ABDUR-RAHMAN MUHAMMAD: This is absolutely stunning. But not when you think about what an evil individual J. Edgar Hoover was perfectly okay with allowing two innocent men to rot in prison for 20 years. It was supposed to be for the rest of their lives. Yes, we know for a fact and have known for quite a while that there were nine undercover FBI informants in the Audubon Ballroom that day. They filed reports in which they described the assassins to a t, especially William Bradley, the shotgun killer. They described him from head to toe, exactly what he looked like. It is right there in the FBI documents. They had this material like the next day. February 22nd, they knew what the shotgun assassin looked like. They were receiving information that this came from Newark. They knew all of this, yet J. Edgar Hoover, to protect his assets, just denied the prosecutor, denied them access to these witnesses who could have exonerated these men and kept them from wasting away all those decades behind bars.
AMY GOODMAN: As Cy Vance said in court, we now have reports on orders from J. Edgar Hoover himself, the FBI ordered multiple witnesses not to tell police or prosecutors that they were in fact FBI informants. Many of those documents were exculpatory. None of them were disclosed to the defense. We want to end with Ameen Johnson who spoke to reporters shortly after his late father Khalil Islam, who died in 2009, was exonerated for killing Malcolm X.
AMEEN JOHNSON: It’s bittersweet. Emotions running everywhere. The fact that my father and my mother were not here, are not here alive to see this and to experience the exoneration is painful because they suffered a lot. They suffered a lot. I believe that their deaths were a direct result of the stress and drama and trauma and post-traumatic stress that this whole situation has caused on them. So I can’t say that I am completely happy, because they are not here and I think that the effects of it removed them from our lives.
AMY GOODMAN: That is Ameen Johnson, who spoke to reporters shortly after his late father Khalil Islam, and Muhammad Aziz, who still alive, were exonerated in court yesterday in New York. Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, we thank you so much for being with us and for your devoted work to Who Killed Malcolm X? The independent scholar, historian, journalist, writer and activist, widely regarded as one of the most respected authorities on the life and legacy of Malcolm X, featured in that 2020 Netflix documentary Who Killed Malcolm X? Next up, Angela Davis responds to North Dakota banning of teaching critical race theory in schools. And we look at Miseducation: How Climate Change is Taught in America. Stay with us.
A U.S. Border Patrol agent instructs asylum-seeking migrants as they line up along the border wall after crossing the Rio Grande river into the United States from Mexico on a raft, in Penitas, Texas, on March 17, 2021. (photo: Adrees Latif/Reuters)
Until recently, denying refugees the right of asylum, sending migrants to be killed in Mexico, and keeping kids in cages were policies considered so evil that for liberal America there was no higher priority than ending them. Then Joe Biden became president.
Well, Biden’s now been president for almost ten months now. Let’s see how he’s done on the issue.
Way back in April, I surveyed Biden’s moves on immigration and found that, after his critical first hundred days, he’d more or less continued Trump’s immigration policy with a few of its coarsest edges shaved down. The racist Muslim ban was gone, Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was reinstated, Biden was reuniting separated migrant families, and he had repealed the “public charge” rule for green card holders. But his administration had also kept in place Trump’s illegal Title 42 order for summarily expelling migrants (with one significant but limited tweak), its rescinding of Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy was full of holes and slow to rectify, children were still being kept in said cages, families were still being separated at the border, and people were still being unfairly deported.
But that was seven months ago. How have things changed since?
Catch-42
Unfortunately for anyone hoping Biden would follow through on his promise to restore a mythical pre-Trump normal, things have continued in largely the same direction on immigration. With Biden reportedly fearing the political backlash from moving away from Trump’s policies, he’s kept Title 42 in place, renewing it in August and actively defending its highly dubious legality in court. I say highly dubious, because by letting authorities simply expel without due process anyone that turns up at the border — ostensibly to protect public health by preventing these migrants from coming in and spreading coronavirus in the country — they’re denying them the right to asylum, an unambiguous violation of US immigration law.
Title 42 may have been the brainchild of actual white supremacist Trump advisor Stephen Miller, but it’s Biden’s policy now. Official CBP statistics show that of the 1.24 million people expelled via Title 42 from March 2020, when Trump put it in place, to September 2021, the vast majority, or more than 793,000, were expelled from February 2021, Biden’s first full month as president, onward.
Many times, these migrants simply try to cross again and then are expelled again, which is partly why these numbers are so high. But in a lot of cases, the administration is sending them or their children to either their deaths or unspeakable violence. By the end of October, Human Rights First had found that since Biden took office, there’d been at least 7,647 instances of attacks, kidnappings, robberies, rapes, and more against people who’d been expelled under the order.
The policy crashed into public consciousness this September, when Biden used it to deal with thousands of Haitian migrants. His administration expelled nearly four thousand people to Haiti in only nine days, nearly half of them families, many of them who’d been living in various South American countries the preceding years, and whose kids had been born in those nations instead of the country they were now being sent to.
Images and video of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers in cowboy hats riding horseback into Haitian migrants and clearly whipping them with their horse reins went viral, quickly spawning a meta-controversy on the Right, with conservatives protesting that the agents had never held actual whips. White House press secretary Jen Psaki, meanwhile, said Biden thought the sight was “horrific and horrible,” and insisted it was “not who the Biden and Harris administration is.” The White House promptly banned the use of horses in the area and went on expelling thousands of Haitians.
Disgruntlement with the policy has been steadily rising. In September, the US special envoy to Haiti resigned, saying he would “not be associated with the United States’ inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti,” pointing to the “collapsed” Haitian government’s inability “to provide security or basic services.” He was followed soon after by state department advisor Harold Koh, who called the administration’s use of Title 42 “illegal” and “inhumane,” charging that “lawful, more humane alternatives plainly exist.” Outside of government, more than a hundred organizations who work with migrants and a hundred and fifty Catholic organizations have called on the Catholic president to end the order, among other things.
Remain in Mexico Remains in Place
Another major bone of contention with immigrant advocacy groups has been the aforementioned Remain in Mexico policy, also known by the Orwellian term Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP). Here the administration was hamstrung by legal challenges to its efforts, with the courts ordering it to reinstate the policy in August — though immigration advocates and even Democratic aides have long insisted the administration has work-arounds.
Under MPP, asylum seekers don’t wait to be processed from the safety of the United States. Instead, they’re sent back to Mexico to wait to hear the outcome of their case, where they’re either vulnerable to the country’s security forces, cartels, and other criminals, or, in a lot of cases, they’re being sent back to the very source of danger they were seeking asylum from in the first place. The human toll of the policy has been similar to Title 42: By August, Human Rights First had documented at least 6,356 cases of kidnappings, sexual assaults, and other violence against those sent to Mexico under the policy.
Frustration finally boiled over last month after a late-night filing from the administration revealed it was getting ready to restore the program in November. It prompted dozens of immigration advocates to organize a virtual walkout on Biden officials in protest, complaining of “having to take out the metaphoric knives from our back” and that they were “bamboozled into thinking that this was going to be the best option,” when “it’s actually worse.”
Kids Still in Cages
Biden has disappointed immigrant advocates in other, less noticed ways. A combination of Trump’s immigrant visa ban, the pandemic, the United States’ archaic processing systems, and the Biden administration’s inability to rectify all this means it allowed at least 100,000 employer-based green card slots to go unused, in what the libertarian Cato Institute’s David Bier called “one of the largest cuts to legal immigration in US history.”
On the one hand, the administration has started to very slowly review and reverse some very specific deportations ordered under Trump, and has extended Temporary Protected Status to thousands of immigrants fearing danger if they return to their home countries. On the other hand, Biden has sped up deportation of asylum-seeking families, reaching an even faster pace than Trump. And in appointing new immigration judges, he’s drawn solely on prosecutors, the military, and immigration officials.
Arrests of undocumented immigrants have fallen to the lowest figure in a decade, and Biden has placed limits on both where agents can make arrests and what kind of immigrants are targeted. Yet he’s also defended numerous restrictionist Trump policies in court, which are aimed at cutting the number of documented migrants entering via legal routes, and his administration is creating an intelligence-gathering cell to identify and keep tabs on large movements of migrants coming up from south of the border.
Meanwhile, the detention conditions that sparked so much outrage under Trump go on: An Amnesty International USA report released in June determined the administration continues to rely on a blanket policy of mass detention for those turning up at the border, where migrants are kept in squalid, abusive conditions. That includes the “kids in cages” that were once a stand-in for Trump’s brutal policies. Immigrant advocacy group RAICES (the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services) found “children being kept in cage-like rooms” by one contractor at a Pecos, Texas, facility, just one of many forms of mistreatment that prompted the group’s president to call it “among the harshest and most restrictive of any ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] or ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] facility that I have visited in my career.”
Sometimes, Biden seems to have been unaware of his own administration’s policies. When asked about news that the government was looking to pay $450,000 to migrant families whose kids had been stolen by Trump, Biden called the reports “garbage” and insisted, “That’s not going to happen.” The American Civil Liberties Union’s executive editor speculated Biden hadn’t been briefed, and a day later the White House reversed itself.
Copying Trump hasn’t yielded many political benefits yet. Biden’s approach is regularly assailed by the nativist right as an “open-borders” policy. Even Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat, charged mid-year that “the more ‘open borders’ vision is winning out at the White House.”
A Border Mirage
Biden’s immigration record as president has been a familiar story of liberal backsliding advancing far-right goals. While reversing a few of Trump’s most outrage-inducing measures and making some small but meaningful tweaks to the country’s deportation machine, the regime Trump reshaped in his own image remains largely in place, with Biden even outdoing his predecessor in some respects.
By far the biggest change is that, while increasingly disillusioned immigration advocates have kept the pressure on the administration, the wall-to-wall, twenty-four-hour-a-day fury from many liberal quarters at what was once the most controversial part of the Trump agenda has largely dissipated. Things have reverted back to the way they were under Barack Obama, with both liberals and conservatives emotionally invested in the same fictitious image of a Democratic president that they jointly helped create: a boldly pro-immigrant, even radical leader who’s throwing open the nation’s doors to all comers.
Short of personally mounting a horse at the border — and even then — it’s doubtful Biden will ever convince the Right he’s anything else. It remains to be seen how long Democratic voters can keep lying to themselves.
Gabriel Boric takes a selfie with members of his electoral campaign and supporters after presenting his government program in Santiago on November 1, 2021. (photo: Esteban Félix/AP)
Chile’s Nov. 21 election, where Boric is one of two frontrunners, is the most high-stakes moment yet in a tumultuous two year national debate over the market-centered economic model established by military dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1980s. With deregulated business and privatized public services and natural resources, the system helped make Chile a haven for foreign investors and one of the richest countries in South America.
But it has also generated the highest rate of inequality in the OECD group of developed nations and untenable living costs for poorer Chileans, with six in ten households earning too little to cover monthly expenses, according to the National Statistics Institute. Starting in October 2019, hundreds of thousands of people participated in months of anti-government protests—a so-called “social explosion”—which culminated in a national vote in 2020 to rewrite the Pinochet-era constitution.
If elected, Boric, who has spent the past seven years as a congressman arguing for the ideals expressed in the social explosion, promises to kill off the old model for good. A Boric-led leftwing coalition would hike taxes on major industries, ramp up public spending to overhaul services, and scrap the private pension system that has underpinned Chile’s capital markets. “If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave,” he told a rally in July after winning the primary for leftist bloc Approve Dignity.
For Boric’s supporters it’s a long-awaited chance to transform a country that has never worked for a majority of its citizens. For his critics, it’s a radical overreaction that will destroy the foundation of Chile’s wealth and stability.
To deliver his vision, though, Boric would have to defeat another insurgent, José Antonio Kast, 51. A far-right former congressman with ties to the Pinochet regime, Kast has surged in the polls over the past six months. His hardline conservative stances on police brutality, indigenous rights and immigration have earned him comparisons to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.
Recent polls put Kast on 26.5% of the vote, only marginally ahead of Boric’s 25%. Though pollsters warn that the recent social upheaval has made it exceedingly difficult to predict voter behavior, the candidates of the center-right ruling party and traditional center-left appear to be languishing in a distant fourth and third place.
The most likely outcome is that Boric and Kast pass to a second round vote in late December, presenting Chile with its starkest choice in decades, says Kenneth Bunker, a political analyst for Chilean media. “These candidates are much more extreme than what we’re used to and that’s opening up topics that we thought were closed in Chile,” he says. “If they pass to the second round, it’s going to be an absolute earthquake for the political system”
Who is Gabriel Boric?
Boric grew up in Magallanes, the southernmost region of Chile. He started in student activism in high school and in 2011, while studying law at the University of Chile, he was elected leader of its student union. That year, college students began a massive organized protest against low public funding and inequity in Chile’s education system, which Boric argued “treats our rights like consumer goods.” Marches and university occupations forced the government into negotiations that eventually yielded sweeping educational reforms.
In 2013, Boric was elected to congress for Magallanes as an independent. He has since cycled through membership of several “new left” parties—most recently Social Convergence—set up to challenge Chile’s longstanding center-left and far left blocs. Boric argues that the centrists, who have had previous stints in power, were not ambitious enough to tackle the country’s deep rooted inequality. Parts of the far-left, meanwhile, have unnerved voters by expressing support for authoritarian leftist regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Boric has embraced positions, such as making currently privately-held water rights a public or common resource, which previous leftist governments in Chile have shied away from. But he cuts a relatively moderate figure, often stressing the importance of dialogue with opponents and becoming one of the most vocal supporters of a November 2019 pact between political parties to end the violence in the streets. Boric’s campaign has focused on grassroots political participation, holding town halls to discuss policy before producing a manifesto of 13,000 proposals,
Bunker says younger Chileans appreciate Boric’s “brutal honesty”: he has for several years spoken openly about suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder and spending time in a psychiatric hospital, breaking a taboo around mental health in Chile. “He represents a younger, more modern, progressive voter, which makes people feel that he’s in synchronicity with the times,” Bunker says.
Chile at a crossroads
Kast offers a very different social and cultural vision for Chile, one aligned with the deeply conservative forces that have ruled in the past. Kast spent most of his political career in a rightwing party founded in the 1980’s that strongly supported the Pinochet regime, despite its murder and torture of tens of thousands of civilians. When Kast first ran for president in 2017—then achieving only marginal support—he claimed that if the dictator were still alive, “he would vote for me.”
Kast has promised to restore order to the streets after the protests, which he dubbed an “anti-social explosion” and recent conflicts with indigenous activists. His manifesto offers “unconditional support” for the carabineros, the police force that watchdogs have accused of human rights abuses (Boric wants to reform and “relaunch” the carabineros).
A staunch Catholic, Kast also wants to push to repeal a 2017 law that made abortion legal under a limited set of circumstances, and on the campaign trail, he has suggested the country dig a three meter-deep ditch along its northern border to keep out migrants and refugees from Venezuela.
But some of the campaign’s most intense debates have centered around the economic model. Kast’s brother, Michael, was a minister in the Pinochet regime and one of the so-called Chicago Boys—a group of economists who helped design Chile’s free market formula after studying at the University of Chicago under economist Milton Friedman. Kast has pledged to defend, “resolutely and rigidly” the model, cutting taxes, regulations and public spending, in order to restore economic growth after three years of recession caused by the unrest and COVID-19. Higher public spending during the pandemic has pushed the deficit to 11.5% of GDP this year, slightly lower than the current U.S. deficit of 12.4%.
Boric, meanwhile, wants a transformation. He advocates the cancellation of student debts, an increase in the minimum wage, expansion of public health care and the introduction of new taxes on the wealthy and on the mining companies that have made fortunes out of Chile’s vast copper resources.
Boric’s most controversial proposal, though, is a plan to replace Chile’s private pension system with a state one. Introduced by Pinochet in 1981, the private scheme obliges Chileans to pay 10% of their income into a pension fund managed by a company, freeing up individual savings for investment in local capital markets.
Multilateral organizations like the World Bank have held up the system as an example for emerging economies struggling to afford public pensions. But many Chileans say it has provided only paltry payouts for retirees and six in 10 want it replaced with a public system.
Stability in question
The pension debate in Chile, which helped fuel the 2019 protests, is now the focal point of concern for business leaders and foreign investors about the future direction of the country as a whole. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, congress has voted three times to allow Chileans to take out 10% of their pension to help cope with job losses, which economists say could have a severe long term impact on future retirees.
Boric’s vote in favour of those withdrawals have led some foreign investors to fear a potential populist slant in his economic policy. “The question is whether [increased public spending] will be done in a responsible way,” Alberto Ramos, a Goldman Sachs analyst told the Financial Times. “They are slowly deviating from the macro model that made Chile the poster child of fiscal responsibility.”
Boric’s critics also say the presence of the Communist Party in his electoral bloc, members of which will likely hold a significant minority of seats in a Boric-led coalition, would allow more radical voices into government, with a potential destabilizing effect for one of the most stable countries in Latin America.
But a Kast victory may be even more destabilizing for Chile, argues Claudia Heiss, head of political science at the University of Chile’s Institute of Public Affairs. Kast is hostile to the project that Chile undertook after the 2019 protests to rewrite its constitution. He says that if he doesn’t like the new draft, due to be delivered by an elected assembly next year ahead of a referendum, he would campaign for it to be rejected.
“The political system has already started taking a change in direction with the constitutional process and Kast is in conflict with that process,” Heiss says. “I think a Boric government can help do the reforms people have asked for, and make the institutional, political route viable. Without that route, we might go back to the large shocks that we saw in the social explosion.”
Deforestation near Humaita, in Amazonas state, Brazil. (photo: Bruno Kelly/Reuters)
Satellite data revealed that deforestation rose by nearly 22 percent from the last period to reach its highest level in 15 years, the National Institute for Space Research found, in a country that is home to most of the world’s largest rainforest.
The numbers come after leaders of more than 100 nations promised at the COP26 climate summit this month to end deforestation over the next decade.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who had made campaign promises to open the Amazon to business development, missed the climate summit in Glasgow, though his country joined the global pledge to save the world’s trees.
With the rate of destruction not slowing, critics questioned whether Brazil can meet its target, and some accused Bolsonaro’s administration of delaying the release of the latest deforestation benchmark until after the U.N. summit — an allegation the environment minister denied.
The Amazon in Brazil lost more than 5,000 square miles of rainforest from August 2020 to July 2021, the government research center said in a report that was dated Oct. 27 and shared on Thursday. It was the fourth year in a row that the rate of deforestation rose, it said.
Climate activists have warned of the risks of letting the global pledge fall short: The devastation of forests drives up greenhouse gas emissions, and Global Forest Watch found the world lost 411 million hectares of forest between 2001 and 2020 — roughly half the size of the United States.
The rainforest in Latin America’s largest country, under pressure from farming, logging and wildfires, is at the heart of the struggle to limit emissions. Trees absorb carbon dioxide when they grow, slowing global warming, but release it into the atmosphere when they decay, or are cut or burned.
Brazil’s Environment Minister Joaquim Leite called the new figures on Thursday “unacceptable” and said the cabinet would do more. At a news conference, he said the data did not reflect recent curbs on environmental crimes.
However, advocacy groups such as the Climate Observatory blamed policies such as road expansion and cuts to environmental fines for making “the world’s largest rainforest disappear before our eyes.” It accused the state of delaying the report’s publication.
“This is the real Brazil that the Bolsonaro administration is trying to hide with its fantasy speeches and greenwashing,” the World Wildlife Fund said in a statement.
The Brazilian president has faced such accusations before. In 2019, he described deforestation data from the National Institute for Space Research as a lie. The head of the research agency was dismissed after he criticized the president and maintained that the data was accurate.
The Ministry of Science and Technology did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the allegation. While the research agency’s workers union said that the government would have known about the annual report, which was ready in October, Leite, the environment minister, told reporters that he had only seen the data this week: “Exactly like you.”
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